Each month, return to “Science of Mind Afterglow” for a full article from the previous month’s edition. It’s a free preview of our transformational content, and we’ll include a new spiritual contemplation to enhance your daily practice. Get ready to pick up new divine signals and insights!
Contemplation: Get still and ignore your tasks for a moment. Breathe in, long and slow. Hand on your heart, ask how love has expanded your sense of self. Feel into that truth and name three aspects of love that have changed your life.
Expanding Who We Are Through Love
by Swati Singh
It was the height of January winter. The day was cloudy, the sun peeking through occasionally. Still, a few of us — close friends — chose to have brunch outside, hoping the sun might warm us. An elderly couple sat a few seats away, the man holding the woman’s palms inside his, rubbing them gently to keep her warm. We caught each other smiling, sharing the same quiet “aww.”
Between coffee refills and half-eaten plates, someone asked, “Do you think love changes over the years?”
“It has grown me, and grown with me, so beautifully over the years that I sometimes wonder how my heart could hold it all,” I responded. “I feel blessed to feel both the rush and the calm of it, together.”
How love makes us feel ultimately shapes the way we see the world. It stays with us, expanding not just our hearts but also our sense of self. And there is a whole science behind it.
Psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron describe it as the “self-expansion model,” which says that one of the deepest rewards of love, especially in intimate relationships, is that it expands who we are, incorporating new skills, perspectives and parts of another into our own sense of self. This leads to new experiences and capabilities through the relationship. It leads to personal growth, excitement and a richer self-concept.
Mature love, then, doesn’t diminish excitement or passion. Instead, it deepens perspective, widens identity and teaches us to hold more of life and each other at once. Love expands not just by adding more feeling, but by expanding who we are.
Love That Shapes the Self
Intimate love brings intensity and discovery. Through shared experiences, joys and life challenges, we incorporate aspects of another into ourselves. The heart expands not only with passion but with understanding, patience and resilience.
We may inspire each other. We may do things because of our partner, only to find we enjoy them. New realms open that teach us something about ourselves. Love does not get less passionate but less possessive. We support, we celebrate, we laugh, we cry — all together. Oh, what a wonderful thing love is.
In the same way, when we are able to expand our circle to humanity at large, we find the purest, most spiritual, ultimate way of expanding love. Expansion becomes bigger than ourselves, embracing strangers, nature, the planet and everything in between.
Various spiritual traditions and great saints and philosophers talk about it. Love expands by undoing us, by breaking fixed ideas of who we are so something larger can emerge.
The expansion of love has little to do with loving more and everything to do with becoming more. What begins as love received early in life, and later shaped through our relationships, slowly learns to breathe with less grasping, less fear, more open-mindedness. Along the way, we sometimes discover that love doesn’t always meet us the way we want. Instead, it guides us forward, coming back in ways we never could have foreseen.
Love does not lose its intensity as it matures. What it loses is the need to control outcomes. In that softening, love becomes wiser, able to hold thrill and calm, closeness and freedom, longing and acceptance, all at the same time. The real surprise isn’t that love changes over the years, but that its deepest growth asks us to grow larger, so love itself doesn’t have to shrink. In the end, love asks nothing from us but the courage to keep our hearts open.
I think back to that question — “Do you think love changes over the years?” — often now. Love doesn’t just change, it grows in its capacity. What begins as intensity grows into capacity, until one day it looks like a man quietly warming the hands of the woman he has become larger with. And you don’t have to grow old for that.
What begins as something we feel becomes something we become. And somehow, that feels like the fullest version of love.
